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Archive for the ‘afghanistan’ Category

From One Generation to the Next: Stopping Wars, Seeking Justice

July 1st, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in afghanistan, antiwar, israel and palestine, youth and students

Washington's Wars and Occupations:

Month in Review #62



By Max Elbaum

War Times/Tiempo de Guerras, 06/29/2010

PASSING THE TORCH

I’ve been the main author of War Times “Month in Review” column since its launch five-plus years ago. This will now change. Starting next month, a talented group of nearly a dozen younger writer/organizers will take over authorship, writing in rotation. They will also write, and War Times will publish, additional analytic and/or feature pieces each month. I will transition to the role of mentor-editor.

 
War Times has been laying the groundwork for this transition for some time. Over the last few months we’ve held a series of analysis-and-writing workshops bringing together long-time collective members with these new writers. All of us have learned from the sessions and they have already started to produce results. Last month’s column focusing on militarism in Afghanistan, Gaza, Arizona and beyond was decisively shaped by our expanded collective discussion. In preparation for the U.S. Social Forum, a member of this new team, Michael Reagan, wrote “Previewing Peace: The Antiwar Movement Heads for Detroit,” which War Times published two weeks ago.


We are excited about the potential this new arrangement can unleash. For starters, it will allow War Times to up our contribution to the antiwar movement. We will generate more articles and cover more dimensions of the multifaceted fight against war, empire-building, militarism, racism and all their inter-connections. The fresh voices of activists whose ongoing work is in many different organizations and struggles will bring new perspectives to an antiwar movement much in need of revitalization.

   
Along with others, War Times believes that a key to re-energizing the fight for peace is rooting anti-militarist perspectives more strongly within grassroots movements of workers, communities of color, immigrant communities and other specially impacted constituencies. Fights for jobs, housing, education, social programs, immigrant rights, to end oil dependence, and to protect the environment drive the most vibrant movements in those sectors today.

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Pentagon’s ‘Wars of Perception’ Being Waged Against Us

April 27th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in afghanistan, antiwar

The Military

Occupation

of Our Minds

 

By Tom Hayden

Huffington Post

April 27, 2010 - As Congress weighs Afghanistan funding, the military is escalating what it calls the "war of perceptions" at home and abroad. The question is whether the American media and Congress will collaborate in the Pentagon's press strategy or retain a critical edge.


It is no accident that the Pentagon is shaping the "information battlespace" by welcoming friendly reporters and think tank hacks to beam back commentaries about the Kandahar offensive to the American people.


Nor is it accidental that the US is soft-pedaling any public criticism of its crooked crony in Kabul, Hamid Karzhai, as thousands of American soldiers are being dispatched to face bullets in his defense.


Nor is there any question that Afghan civilian casualties are being downplayed or covered-up. The agency in charge of counting the bodies, the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, published a footnote last year admitting "there is a significant possibility that UNAMA is under-reporting civilian casualties."

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The Wars: Why ‘Out Now!’ Is Both Proper and Pragmatic

April 25th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in afghanistan, antiwar, iraq

Photo: Soviet Troops Pulling Out

Yes, We Could... Get Out!

Why We Won’t Leave Afghanistan or Iraq


By Tom Engelhardt

Yes, we could.  No kidding.  We really could withdraw our massive armies, now close to 200,000 troops combined, from Afghanistan and Iraq (and that’s not even counting our similarly large stealth army of private contractors, which helps keep the true size of our double occupations in the shadows).  We could undoubtedly withdraw them all reasonably quickly and reasonably painlessly.

Not that you would know it from listening to the debates in Washington or catching the mainstream news.  There, withdrawal, when discussed at all, seems like an undertaking beyond the waking imagination.  In Iraq alone, all those bases to dismantle and millions of pieces of equipment to send home in a draw-down operation worthy of years of intensive effort, the sort of thing that makes the desperate British evacuation from Dunkirk in World War II look like a Sunday stroll in the park.  And that’s only the technical side of the matter.

Then there’s the conviction that anything but a withdrawal that would make molasses in January look like the hare of Aesopian fable -- at least two years in Iraq, five to ten in Afghanistan -- would endanger the planet itself, or at least its most important country: us.  Without our eternally steadying hand, the Iraqis and Afghans, it’s taken for granted, would be lost. Without the help of U.S. forces, for example, would the Maliki government ever have been able to announce the death of the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq?  Not likely, whereas the U.S. has knocked off its leadership twice, first in 2006, and again, evidently, last week.

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Washington’s Wars and Occupations: ‘Maxed Out on Risk’

March 31st, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in afghanistan, antiwar, israel and palestine

Obama greeting troops in Afghanistan

Change Happens Slowly,

Except When It Happens Fast

 

By Max Elbaum

War Times/Tiempo de Guerras

March 31, 2010 – “Change happens slowly," Tom Hayden wrote a few months ago, "except when it happens fast." That's an important insight to keep in mind when looking at the wars and occupations that afflict the Middle East right now.

On the surface, from one month to the next there seems to be little or no change. U.S. military operations, political bullying and backing for Israeli colonialism grind on. Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians, Pakistanis and Americans - among others - continue to die in Washington's illegal, immoral wars.

Yet every week events take place that indicate the potential for big changes ahead. These reflect one underlying fact: The offensive George Bush launched nine years ago aimed at attaining a qualitatively new level of U.S. domination via military force did not succeed. The consequences of this failure are still playing out to Washington's disadvantage.

So the U.S. is now engaged in what is simultaneously a delicate (in geo-strategic terms) and brutal (in human terms) salvage operation. The goal is to "stabilize" the region in a way that maintains maximum U.S. clout but does not lock Washington into impossible quests which drain U.S. military, political and financial strength and undermine already-declining U.S. global hegemony.

Washington's dilemma was captured by one insightful mainstream commentator, the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg: "The U.S. is maxed out on risk."

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Audacity of Empire and the 80-year ‘Long War’

March 30th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in afghanistan, antiwar, iraq

The 'Long War' Quagmire

The doctrine, which posits an 80-year or so war against insurgents in the Middle East to South Asia, needs more scrutiny.

 

By Tom Hayden

March 28, 2010

Without public debate and without congressional hearings, a segment of the Pentagon and fellow travelers have embraced a doctrine known as the Long War, which projects an "arc of instability" caused by insurgent groups from Europe to South Asia that will last between 50 and 80 years. According to one of its architects, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are just "small wars in the midst of a big one."

 
Consider the audacity of such an idea. An 80-year undeclared war would entangle 20 future presidential terms stretching far into the future of voters not yet born. The American death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan now approaches 5,000, with the number of wounded a multiple many times greater. Including the American dead from 9/11, that's 8,000 dead so far in the first decade of the Long War. And if the American armed forces are stretched thin today, try to conceive of seven more decades of combat.


The costs are unimaginable too. According to economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, Iraq alone will be a $3-trillion war. Those costs, and the other deficit spending of recent years, yield "virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors," according to a New York Times budget analysis in February. Continued deficit financing for the Long War will rob today's younger generation of resources for their future.

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The Fight Is On – Antiwar Counter-Surge vs. Obama War & Escalation

December 1st, 2009 by admin | No Comments | Filed in afghanistan, antiwar, pushing obama

Obama Announces

Afghanistan Escalation

By Tom Hayden

December 1, 2009
It's time to strip the Obama sticker off my car. Obama's escalation in Afghanistan is the last in a string of disappointments. His flip-flopping acceptance of the military coup in Honduras has squandered the trust of Latin America. His Wall Street bailout leaves the poor, the unemployed, minorities, and college students on their own. And now comes the Afghanistan-Pakistan decision to escalate the stalemate, which risks his domestic agenda, his Democratic base, and possibly even his presidency. The expediency of his decision was transparent. Satisfy the generals by sending 30,000 more troops. Satisfy the public and peace movement with a timeline for beginning withdrawals of those same troops, with no timeline for completing a withdrawal. Obama's timeline for the proposed Afghan military surge mirrors exactly the 18-month Petraeus timeline for the surge in Iraq. We'll see. To be clear: I'll support Obama down the road against Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs or any of the pitchfork carriers for the pre-Obama era. But no bumper sticker until the withdrawal strategy is fully carried out. (more...)

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‘Long War’ Theory: Looking Deeper into the Heart of Darkness

October 31st, 2009 by admin | No Comments | Filed in afghanistan, antiwar, militarism
David Kilcullen, 'Long War' Theorist

 

Kilcullen's Long War

By Tom Hayden 

The Nation

Let us say, hypothetically, that American forces kill or capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, enabling President Obama to declare victory and bring our troops home. Would he? Not according to the Pentagon's plan for a fifty-year "Long War" of counterinsurgency spanning Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines and beyond.

Military intellectuals envision a prolonged cold war against Al Qaeda, with hot wars along the way. It happens that the Long War is over Muslim lands rich with oil, natural gas and planned pipelines. The Pentagon identifies them as hostile terrain where Al Qaeda and its affiliates are hidden.

Among the top experts responsible for this fifty-year war plan, concocted in 2005 in windowless offices in the Pentagon, is Dr. David Kilcullen, a former Australian soldier, an anthropologist, former top adviser to Gen. David Petraeus and current aide to Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Kilcullen is a media favorite, the subject of a long New Yorker profile by George Packer, glowing columns by David Ignatius in the Washington Post and weighty late-night conversations with Charlie Rose.

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Afghan War and the Need to Stop It

October 31st, 2009 by admin | No Comments | Filed in afghanistan, antiwar, pushing obama

Afghanistan Election
Fraud and the High
Price of Empire

By John Nichols
The Nation

09/10/2009  - It is amusing, if remarkable, that there are still some players in Washington who try to maintain the fantasy that Afghan President Hamid Karzai governs with anything akin to legitimacy.

Karzai, an alleged oil industry fixer awarded control of his country by occupying powers, has always served with strings attached.

And the Afghan people have been quite aware of that fact.

It is true that, at different points over the past eight years, Karzai has enjoyed measures of popular support, thanks to alliances with warlords and drug dealers, the inflaming of ethnic rivalries and an awareness that he was the one distributing all those billions of dollars from the United States.

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